Owner

Current status

Detailed Description

The aim is to synchronize Fedora with the most recent Boost release. Because ABI stability is one of explicit Boost non-goals, this entails rebuilding of all dependent packages. This has also always entailed yours truly assisting maintainers of client packages in decoding cryptic boostese seen in output from g++. Such care is to be expected this time around as well.

Boost 1.60 is scheduled for release on 2 Dec 2015 and a beta release is already available for testing

In order to discover any problems ASAP the proposal owner has created a COPR and built the Boost 1.60.0 beta, and started rebuilding the 300+ dependent packages. The results of this COPR will be thrown away, but it means any bugs in the upstream release can be reported and fixed before the final release (rather than patched in the Fedora package) and any changes needed in dependent packages will be known sooner.

Other developers:

Those who depend on Boost DSOs will have to rebuild their packages. Feature owners will alleviate some of this work as indicated above, and will assist those whose packages fail to build in debugging them.

The proposal owner has already started test rebuilds of affected packages and identifying the needed changes, and will propose patches to Boost upstream or to the client packages' upstreams as appropriate.

Apart from scope, this is business as usual, so no policies, no guidelines.

Trademark approval:

N/A (not needed for this Change)

Upgrade/compatibility impact

No impact on system upgrade.

Some impact on other packages. Historically this hasn't been too big of a problem and could always be resolved before deadline.

How To Test

No special hardware is needed.

Integration testing simply consists of installing Boost packages (yum install boost) on Fedora and checking that it does not break other packages (see below for a way to obtain a list of boost clients).

Contingency Plan

Contingency mechanism: worst case scenario is to abandon the update and simply ship F24 with Boost 1.59, which is already in rawhide, and is already newer than the 1.58.0 release shipped in F23.

Contingency deadline: We will know whether the change can be made once the rebuilds in the side tag are done, which is likely to be some time in December, well before the deadline for system-wide change proposals. We might even know before, as the proposal author is already testing the beta release of Boost 1.60 and doing test rebuilds in COPR.

Blocks release? No

Blocks product? None

Documentation

Release Notes

Boost has been upgraded to version 1.60. Apart from a number of bugfixes and improvements to existing libraries, this brings three new libraries compared to Fedora 23, Boost.Convert, Boost.Coroutine2 and Boost.VMD.